During a visit to Bethlehem, LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, recalls watching as an Israeli soldier pretended to shoot at a bunch of kids who were playing nearby. “Like they were ducks,” she remembers. “Even to this day, I can’t take it.”
Journalist Tiffany Cross, author of Love, Me: A Letter to Black Women in a Toxic Country, Career, and Relationship, visited the region under the auspices of AIPAC. It did not go as her sponsor planned. “Oh, I know exactly what this is,” Cross recalls thinking. “The Palestinians here are treated like black people.”
There was a consensus among many of the black women supporting Harris that a Palestinian speaker should have been allowed at the convention. But there also was a deep sense that the 2024 election presented a binary—Trump or Harris—and many in the Arab American community had made the wrong choice. This perspective originates in the basic truth that black people are a minority in a country that, at best, tolerates their existence. And that vulnerability has landed with particular weight on black women.
The very American imperialism that so endangered Muslim life had its roots in genocide and enslavement, the latter of which always took particular interest in black women. At its root, it was a system of rape, industrial in both scale and effect. Enslavement or freedom was passed down to the child through the mother, meaning white men could augment a workforce trafficked from Africa by raping with impunity and enslaving their offspring. “She alone could give birth to a slave,” the historian Paula Giddings writes in her book When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. “Blacks constituted a permanent labor force and metaphor that were perpetuated through the Black woman’s womb.”
Typical of rape survivors, black women were freighted with a particular kind of animus. “Mistresses and masters (and overseers) described slave women as lazier, filthier; more shiftless, slatternly, ignorant and impudent than slave men,” writes Thavolia Glymph in her book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. The stereotypes mirrored a real-world disregard for the suffering of black women. Antebellum physician J. Marion Sims is known as the father of modern gynecology. He did this “fathering” by operating on the unanesthetized bodies of enslaved black women and girls.
But if America made black women a uniquely acted-upon class, black women too made themselves a unique class of political actors. Their particular oppression became a particular bond, evidenced in the pressure they were able to bring upon the Biden presidency. And that particular oppression also made the promise of a black woman president something more than another item on a checklist of firsts or the humoring of a particular interest group. “We would bring others along, which has always been the case,” says Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. “Even when our full freedoms were not actualized, we made it possible for others’ freedoms to be realized.”
